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Topic: PRO-IP Act signed into Law (Read 2520 times)

What the smurf is my government doing? The RIAA and the MPAA have won a major advantage in screwing over everyday citizens like you and me with the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO-IP) Act that was signed into law today.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush signed into law on Monday a controversial bill that would stiffen penalties for movie and music piracy at the federal level.

The law creates an intellectual property czar who will report directly to the president on how to better protect copyrights both domestically and internationally. The Justice Department had argued that the creation of this position would undermine its authority.

The PRO-IP Act does three things, generally: 1) it increases the penalties for infringement by expanding what is considered a 'work;' 2) it broadens the ability of the government to permanently seize goods; and 3) it creates an Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, a new cabinet position whose sole job is to increase intellectual property enforcement. In short, it's a load of bad news for consumers, but really, it's not that much good news for many intellectual property owners either, as I'll explain.

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I hesitate to think what might happen if a machinima is made from a game using the licensed soundtrack in absence of a Machinima Rule from the developer. Not only could the machinima maker be looking at issues from both the game developer and the musicians, but so could anyone who downloads the video.

Sounds like it's time to start using TrueCrypt for your PC that doesn't even leave your house!

And as we all know, this will (as usual) end up hitting fan-videos (like machinimas), small-time pirates (the teenage daughter who downloaded 50 tracks off of napster), while big-time pirates (especially the ones that sell and profit from it) will continue pretty much unaffected because they're already covering their behinds.

Sickening.

It's also pretty nasty how the US laws affect other and slightly saner countries. Anybody remember the DeCSS case? Jon Johanson hadn't done anything that was illegal according to Norwegian law when he published the source on his dad's webserver, but the media monkeys in .us flexed their muscles enough that the police.no raided him and confiscated all his electronical gadgets - including cellphone.

What this now means is that, for consumers, more or less anything that has come into contact with that pirated item can be seized by the government. The statute is worded in such a broad manner that it would be theoretically possible to seize all of the computers in a home or office if one pirated MP3 or piece of software was present. More importantly, the penalties have changed so that individual elements are now imputed as works. For example, before it was considered to be downloading a 'work' to download an entire CD. Now, each individual track would be considered a 'work,' so one CD is now ten or more times the penalty that it once was. Similarly, if you copied a magazine with 100 photographs in it, you would now be liable for each copywritten photograph and article separately.